It was important that we spoke in terms of solutions rather than had a winge - This was a gentle conversation that lead to the following ‘top tips’:

Self-awareness – knowing how you like to work, when are good times in the day, when to say – ‘this is not the right time to be doing admin’ – and adjusting your work patterns according to these things.

Check out “experience design” aka “service design” for a more holistic approach to audience relationship, making marketing, brand development, merchandising, copyrighting, audience development … all a creative task, and not typically administrative.

Check out “Getting Things Done” – David Allen. For freeing the mind of stress by trying to remember everything all the time.

Check out “Myers Briggs” personality types, for knowing how you work; how you learn – to alter approach to tasks according to your needs.

Meditation techniques for staying in the present – instead of energy wasted by being preoccupied by a second task while dealing with the one at hand. This can help with switching between the creative and administrative mindset.

Overall – it came back to being self-aware: knowing how you like to work, trusting this as correct, and working within this knowledge. Eg. If you tend to feel half asleep after lunch avoid doing heavy mental work after lunch, or better still – take a siesta.

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Latest

We live now in information - it is our environment. An aspect of what we can do in response to current events is the information we have about what's actually going on. Perhaps if we can clean up the information environment we will make better decisions about what to do next.

Schools still run on a 19th Century industrialised model; how can improvisation support a more holistic approach to education that helps young people tackle the complex challenges that the future holds?

To get more diversity in our arts scene we will need to deal with the emotional undercurrents that are fueling our behaviour and impeding progress. What solutions do we have for addressing this? We did focus on what it means to be a woman who is doing this. What is below is not a prescription, rather a record of our discussion.

"How do we improve female working class visiblility in the arts?" was the question posed at the start of day.
As a female arts sector leader (Festival Director - therefore a programmer, fundraiser, commissioner, debater, network lead/contributor, ambassador, etc), I felt it was important to ask what people wanted or needed from me, as someone who has a voice -in certain spaces- to offer. I was trying to buck the assumption that I would already know what women wanted from their peers and lead

How can we better develop the connection between main stage and education/participation work?
Is there a stigma attached to participation work from an audiences perspective that means they don't attend performances with this at its heart? Do audiences fear it will be of lesser quality therefore not want to risk wasting their valuable money?

The use of co-productions between opera houses across different parts of the world is claimed to be a way to pool companies’ resources and save money. However, is a consequence of this practice that such productions are likely to communicate less effectively with the audience of any single theatre because they are trying to reach too many different audiences at the same time and because taste varies so greatly across the world?

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